Ethical And Legal Issues Of Child Abuse

Introduction

I went through all the topics that were included in this assignment. I can write little about this entire topic or pick one specific topic to discuss, so I decided that I am going to discuss briefly child abuse. Child abuse is eye attracting for everyone because many children are dying annually because of maltreatment and this kind of abuse impacts one’s health over the lifespan.

I will be writing about the legal and professional issues that arise when nurses come in contact with the child being abused, some of the relevant codes and implications for the nurses and primary health workers while documenting and reporting of child abuse.

Legal and professional issues, relevant codes and implication for nurses and primary health workers:

We can observe daily child’s behavior and accordingly early recognition, prevention; planning, intervention, and reporting can be done. A nurse can work in collaboration with child welfare organization for the protection of the child from the abuse (Jordan, Mackay and Woods 2017, p. 194). (Caneira and Myrick 2015, p. 645) Primary health care workers have also equal responsibility in caring abused child. Their duties include screening, diagnosing, treating and reducing the risk and number of child abuse in coming future days. The screening practice will give a chance to explore those families who are at high risk of child abuse and also will be helpful in providing comprehensive care.

This kind of care provider must be well known to the terms related to child abuse. Also some mandatory reporters sometime they will be charged for giving a false report or for lying. Likewise, most of the state has good faith law which will protect them from being charged with reporting abuse. All this knowledge beforehand is valuable for protecting yourself from getting into any kind of problem (Hurst and Avitai 2017).

Examples of Abuses done in the name of

It is facilitating more sexual abuse to happen. One incident was reported in the United States. A person who is 39 years old had received therapy for depression. After going through that session he started remembering the sexual abuse done to him when he was 12 years old. The abuse was done by him by the priest of Catholic Church. The question was asked to him why he didn’t report the case when the incident happened. The reply was shocking. Since the priest of the church is considered as God, no one was going to believe that a person who is regarded as a god could do this. That is why the issue was suppressed inside him all these years by Berry, 1992; Blanchard, 1991; Isely & Isely, 1990; Laaser, 1991 (cited in Bottoms et al. 2017, p. 562).

Similarly, a retrospective study was done in Anglican Church of Australia about the child abuse. There were many allegations made against the abuse. The male children were abused more in the church because the abusers were allowed to spend more time with boys than the girls. The abusers were the clerks and the volunteer leader in the church. Likewise, on doing research the majority of percentage comprises of the child abuse done in Catholic Church in North America (Parkinson, Oates and Jayakody 2012, p.